Savage Inequalities: Children In America's Schools Quotes
"What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?"
"We had not been listening much to children in these recent years... The voices of children, frankly, had been missing from the whole discussion."
"Most of the urban schools I visited were 95 to 99 percent nonwhite."
"The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson."
"The perceived objective was a more 'efficient' ghetto school."
"Social policy in the United States, to the extent that it concerns black children and poor children, has been turned back several decades."
"These urban schools were, by and large, extraordinarily unhappy places."
"Every child, every mother, in this city is, to a degree, in the position of a supplicant for someone else’s help."
"Why not spend on children here at least what we would be investing in their education if they lived within a wealthy district?"
"The overwhelming sensation is emptiness... What’s left is, literally, nothing."
"Gifted children are everywhere in East St. Louis, but their gifts are lost to poverty and turmoil."
"The soil cannot be de-leaded overnight, and the ruined spirits of the men who camp out in the mud and shacks close to the wire fencing of Monsanto can’t be instantly restored to life."
"I’m teaching them three things. Number one: self-motivation. Number two: self-esteem. Number three: you help your sister and your brother."
"If you don’t, as an American, begin to give these kids the kind of education that you give the kids of Donald Trump, you’re asking for disaster."
"These are the kids most in need, and they get the worst teachers."
"You cannot issue an appeal to conscience in New York today. The fair-play argument won’t be accepted. So you speak of violence and hope that it will scare the city into action."
"It doesn’t take a genius to discover that you learn more in a smaller class."
"If children are seen primarily as raw material for industry, a greater investment in the better raw material makes sense."
"We are creating an entire generation of incompetents."
"These children see TV. They know what suburban schools are like. Then they look around them at their school. This was a roller-rink, you know… They don’t comment on it but you see it in their eyes. They understand."
"Some things you know. Some kinds of logic are inside of you to start with. There are other things that someone needs to teach you."
"We know certain things that other kids don’t know because we’re taught them."
"Everyone can think and speak in logical ways unless they have a mental problem. What this program does is bring us to a higher form of logic."
"The very concept of a 'right' is what they are examining today."
"I know why the caged bird sings... It is not a carol of joy."
"If society's resources would be wasted on their destinies, perhaps their own determination would be wasted too."
"Most of the students in this school won't go to college. Many of them will join the military."
"You can take them out of the environment, but you can't take the environment out of them."
"People on the outside may think that we don't know what it is like for other students, but we visit other schools and we have eyes and we have brains."
"Why should I go to war and fight for opportunities I can't enjoy—for things rich people value, for their freedom, but I do not have that freedom and I can't go to their schools?"
"How long will it be before white children and black and Hispanic children in New York will go to the same schools? How long has the United States existed? Give it another two hundred years."
"What is the result? We are preparing a generation of robots."
"They do not learn to think, because their teachers are straitjacketed by tests that measure only isolated skills."
"The children in the highest groups become elitist, selfish, and they separate themselves from other children."
"Eighty percent are failed, because of what has not been done for them in elementary school."
"Their entire ninth grade year becomes test preparation."
"The high school proficiency exam controls curriculum."
"They have learned that education is a brittle, abstract ritual to ready them for an examination."
"They do not yet understand what is in store for them."
"This is supposed to be the church attended by Walt Whitman."
"Camden, he says, once had more industry per capita than any city in the world."
"Anything that would reduce the property values of a town like Cherry Hill is sited here in Camden."
"By the end of the first semester they are back in Camden."
"Some of those men out there will be in jail tonight."
"The story that is not told is the lifelong deformation of poor children by their own society and government."
"Once these children learn that lovely and transcendent things are not for them, it may be a little easier to settle for the cheaper satisfactions."
"You couldn't permit this sort of thing unless you saw these children and their parents as a little less than human."
"They don’t buy the explanation that it’s poverty, or public schools, or racial segregation."
"Crack addiction strikes me sometimes as a kind of ‘covert’ suicide."
"If you degrade people's self-respect on a daily basis, over centuries, you are bound to produce monsters."
"It isn’t safe either for those who live there or for those who visit."
"Why should we be paying with our taxes for their sneakers and their gold chains and their crack addictions?"
"How much exactly does a person have the right to ask?"
"It is unmistakable that many of these jobs are now reserved for nonwhite personnel."
"The presence of a white man at the head of a large urban system that is warehousing black children would be quite suggestive and provocative."
"It offers symbolism that protects the white society against the charges of racism."
"Safe for an adult to visit? Children live their whole lives in these neighborhoods!"
"We may ask again, therefore, what 'local governance' in fact implies in public education."
"Nearly 1,000 infants die each year in Chicago because of lack of medical care."
"Principals have no choice about accepting tenured teachers."
"Substitutes represent more than one quarter of Chicago faculty."
"Nearly twice the student population of New Trier High School."
"Like soldiers who have seen too much combat."
"Children who just disappear from the face of the earth."